At my divorce hearing the judge ruled I’d leave with nothing. My husband leaned down and told me to see how long I’d last. Then the courtroom doors went.

And nobody in that room said anything at all.
PART 2

The folder is called PRYCE, ANWEN — STANDING FILE.

It is four hundred and eleven pages and it is in four sections with tabs on them.

Birth records. Care records. School. And photographs.

And on the front page of section one, in a box in the top corner, there is a date.

The date that file was opened.

The ninth of April, 2009.

I was eight years old in the April of 2009. I was in the second year of a primary school out past Belgrave.

My mother was Nia Pryce.

She was twenty-three when she had me, in the June of 2001.

And she worked in the contracts department at Marrow Reinsurance, on the fourth floor of a building on Belgrave Road, from the August of 1999 to the April of 2002.

She died in the November of 2006. I was five years and five months old.